Asklemmy

43907 readers

1066 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

135

What technical issues did you ignore for an extended period of time? (leminal.space)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

99 comments fedilink hide all child comments

On my old phone I had an issue with the proximity sensor and front facing camera. This led me to holding my phone backwards to take photos and being unable to hang up phone calls.

I think I put up with this for a year and a half.

I did end up figuring out the issue with the proximity sensor but opening up my phone to reconnect the camera module was too much effort for me.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (4 children)

At university in the 90s some friends and I ran our own Linux server. It was a 486 or early Pentium and we hooked it up to the university network in a post grad student's office who was happy to just keep it running under his desk.

We even got the campus sysadmins to give us a proper edu domain name. It was a more open and different time and ethernet still meant coax cables with T connectors and terminators.

We were running pre v1 kernel on slackware and it was all installed from floppies. We used it as a web server, coded and played muds, read newsgroups and mail etc. I think tin and pine etc. we easily had 20 users using it from the computer labs.

Anyways the computer kept dying or freezing occasionally. Still early Linux. And the office where it was kept wasn't always open and we didn't have a key.

Being electronic engineering students we built a whole circuit with a PIC controller which plugged into the parallel port. We wrote a watchdog daemon which would keep pinging this dongle. And the firmware on the PIC would check for these pings.

If the server died the pings would stop and the dead man's switch dongle was wired directly into the hardware reset button of the PC.

Worked like a charm for 4 years. And apparently worked for another 5 or 6 after I left.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Those were truly wonderful times. I remember even around 2000 campus network security was minimal to non-existent and we were all just going wild and I learned so much.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It was so much fun. I still get some of the same thrills building a retro console using a rpi, or a home media server in the garage using a second hand dual Xeon motherboard.

But sadly as the CEO of a software firm I don't get to hack away much on anything anymore.

I do occasionally get to impress the young ones with my Linux command line wizardry and 1337 vim skills. I really need to get a beard.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Home self hosted stuff is definitely the only time I usually get to have fun with this stuff. Work can sometimes involve fun problem solving but by the time you cut through all the red tape to get it anywhere the thrill is gone.

load more comments (1 replies)